On the Nature of Consciousness.

Morguefile/FX/Louis.

by the Evil Dr. Emile Schmitt-Rottluff




Our consciousness exists mostly inside of our own heads. It sounds either self-evident or a college entry-level rubric, but it’s obvious that when we look out on the world, we’re not aware of looking out of our foot. Our foot isn’t even aware or able to sense the ground under it. It has to send information to the brain, which sends back appropriate instructions, many of which are sub-conscious, our only conscious decision being whether we want to walk somewhere or not.

There’s plenty of information coming in from everywhere.

Our consciousness seems to be located in our head, where our thoughts are. This is located directly behind our eyes, surely the number one sensory organ in modern human beings. We process vast quantities of visual information. This is a good place to be located in our bodies, as we can see out and we have everything at our disposal…

But our consciousness is also our identity, which doesn’t change whether we’re hot or cold, running or walking. It is who we are as a person. It’s how we think of ourselves. Science fiction stories about the uploading of consciousness sometimes seem to try and preserve that sense of identity—that sense of self, although there are stories where all memories, all traces of personality are stripped away, leaving a husk, a thrall, a kind of kidnapping of the body but leaving the person out of the equation. But there is no real reason to upload a body. Only a consciousness.

I’ll go off and read other people’s work on consciousness in a minute. But I thought I would get my thoughts down first, before being influenced by some credible opinion. There are lots of studies out there, all kinds of theories and a lot of really interesting literary work.

I think consciousness arose as a defense mechanism—otherwise we would have eaten our feet on the path of evolution. Nature invests heavily in higher organisms. They shouldn’t get knocked down and eaten too easily. It’s a balance between waste and renewal. When I was a kid I saw a praying mantis that had a grasshopper in his claws and he was eating it. The grasshopper had a chunk of leaf or grass in its claws. It was eating it too. I wondered if the thing could even feel pain, or why it didn’t struggle to escape. It seemed quite unaware of its predicament.

A virus doesn’t need to be conscious to do its job. A sea anemone doesn’t need to be conscious to do its job either. The currents bring food to it, and it doesn’t grow well where there aren’t enough nutrients or currents. The reproductive cycle is simple but robust. The sea anemone is a kind of a no-brainer. As life-forms become more complex, and as they acquire more sensory organs, and the more active and varying survival strategies are demanded from them, then consciousness becomes necessary. The brain gets bigger to accommodate demands made on it. It can no longer just feel food against its lips and begin biting, but now our life form must evade predators, it must colonize, nest, migrate, predate, raise young, lay eggs, store food, make homes…the list is familiar; it’s animal behaviour in all of its complexity. And certainly the higher animals are conscious to some degree. They have to be.

Robert Fludd.

Plants can be phototropic in that they turn with the sun. They also grow faster in daylight, and slow down at night. This simplistic behaviour is purely thermodynamic in principle. In higher animals, the thermodynamics are much more complex. It’s all ruled by algorithms, with an infinite number of variables over time. We are chemical beings. Your dog will never think of himself as a chemical being ruled by thermodynamic algorithms in a complex social environment. In that sense it is a lower life form because it has a lower form of consciousness…in a kind of legalistic sense.

The ability to invent abstract ideas comes from consciousness. A subconscious entity has no reason to invent anything, for its duties will necessarily be limited, such as respiration, digestion, and glandular production, in the human body.

Who are we? Are we our body? It is the ‘habeas corpus’ of the legal men. This is my body, this must be me. My toe is a part of me. But if you cut off my toe, I doubt if I would feel as if a small part of my conscious self had somehow gone with it. All of me would remain intact in terms of consciousness. We live in our brains and not our toe.

Even as an atheist, perhaps denying the existence of the soul, could any rational person deny that most of us see our inner self—our ‘consciousness,’ as kind of riding around on top of a big biological machine, a bit like sitting in the control room of an Imperial Walker?

If we could upload my consciousness, that’s all well and good. But how would I feel anything?

I won’t argue whether all knowledge could be downloaded into our brains, or whether we could access a databank through an interface with some kind of electronic storage system. Or else it’s something akin to spiritual, and now we’re psychically beaming waves into your brain, and maybe some organic structure in there can detect and decode it. Simply reverse the process and your brain is loaded into the databanks. Right? Download my brain through wireless.

If you could hook up a computer to a body—a real, live body, with all of its sensory organs intact, including eyes, ears, nose, mouth, fingers and toes—the machine would have all of the same experiences as a human being, except we have transplanted the brain of a pig into the body of a man.

By one measure of the law, ‘brain dead is legally dead.’ This is for the benefit of the living heirs of the body. But what happens when the body won’t die, or what happens when the mind just goes away, as in the case of amnesia? Where do we stand legally there?

What if a mind is simply wiped by heavy brainwashing techniques, leaving the body free for other things, other masters, and other personalities?

What then, eh?

For more on consciousness read this article on Wiki.
Here's something on thermodynamics, important in 'cell biology' among other things.

This is interesting, a story on the film altered states and all about sensory deprivation can be found at the link.

These are used extensively for out-of-body projection by the Centralian Empire in my novel ‘The Case of the Curious Killers.’ That book asks the question, what is reality? The answer is that reality is subjective, it is what you can see. Consciousness is said to be what we see around us--essentially the same thing.

Therefore, consciousness is reality, but a very subjective one.

END

The Evil Dr. Schmitt-Rottluff appears in 'On the Nature of the Gods,' and is a regular guest on this blog.

Time In A Bottle. And Why Gravity Bends Reality.

Time is not a physical constant. While time can be measured precisely at a given location, the effect of gravitation on time is that it expands and contracts.

Yet it is my sense that time does not stretch, but perhaps the gaps between quanta of time may become enlarged. Like Formula One cars, the gaps between them open up as they accelerate onto the straightaways, and the ‘cars,’ or quanta, bunch up under braking and turning—and turning, or ‘lateral acceleration,’ is indistinguishable from gravity. Gravity bends light, so why not time, or even ‘reality’ itself?

In a 1971 experiment, atomic clocks were carried on supersonic aircraft. One traveled east, (in the direction of Earth’s rotation,) and the other traveled west.

After the globe-encircling flights, the clocks on both planes either gained or lost time when compared to a ground-based atomic clock.

This was confirmation of a predicted effect of relativity. Mathematics predicted it, and experiment confirmed the existence of time dilation. Now, it seems to me that the speed, or velocity of the aircraft, relative to the magnetic field, is what causes the actual time dilation. The aircraft are crossing magnetic lines of force, which causes the temporal distortion.

Let us assume that we can isolate this one variable in the equation. Now solve for all other operations, factors, sets, etc. This answer is fine if there is no motion, (or no gravity.) Now, hit this ‘answer’ with your last variable-factor, i.e., ‘velocity in a magnetic field of x-force.’ This isolated variable means the answer we end up with is not a constant, it can be ‘accurate to the tenth decimal place,’ and even ‘precise,’ without ever quite being correct.

That is because there really is no correct answer. Would time distort in the presence of gravity but in the absence of motion? Good question, but if it does, it must distort less than it would at a higher velocity. The answer is that the dilation is both variable and a constant. This is a necessary fiction, in some sense. It is the correct answer mathematically, but philosophically, ‘wrong.’ The trouble is you have nothing else to compare it with, in keeping with our notion of ‘relativity.’

You can cut something in half an infinite number of times, and each quantum of time is a separate and distinct entity. Could we cut a quantum of time in half, and what would happen if we did? Would it break reality? Would it sever the time line, and yet that is a contradiction, for it cannot start twice…? If a quantum exhibits characteristics of both a wave and a particle at the same time, is it divisible at all?

Can we do both, or neither, at one and the same time, or separately?

If you made yourself really, really, small, you would see the forces of the universe at work—you would see magnetic lines of force, and stretching off into your future, little white marks like the lines on a highway. The nearest quanta look ‘big’ and the farther they are away, they look ‘small.’ At some point, they appear to be a continuous white line. These are quanta of time.

You would see electrons buzzing around in their orbits and the little strings that keep them from flying away, and the links between molecules.

You would see things that only God has ever seen before. Statistically speaking, at a temperature of absolute zero, there will still be molecular motion. Statistically speaking, it ‘must’ be happening. No one can ‘prove’ it, except mathematically. Is time temperature dependent? Would time stand still at zero degrees K? My personal opinion is that time marches on regardless.

Can we save time in a bottle? I don’t know.

In a previous monograph, I referred to reality as a ‘bubble,’ expanding outwards from a point of singularity. Reality does not exist inside the bubble, it is in fact the skin of the bubble itself. Points relative to each other on that ‘bubble’ of reality will expand away from each other as time goes on. This is simple topology.

So-called ‘reality,’ is a one-dimensional plane surface that is not flat—it is a hollow sphere, made of a material of infinite thinness. We live inside of that material. We cannot go ‘forward,’ in the direction of expansion, for that is the future and it hasn’t happened yet, and worse, it may never happen. We cannot go back, for that is the past, and to go back into the past is to change the unchangeable. All we can do is to remain in our matrix, an infinite expressed in one-dimensional topological terms.

My little handheld calculator only goes up to eight digits, and with my education, I don’t mess around with powers and scientific notation and stuff like that.

In order to understand things, we must describe them. The language must necessarily be precise. In that sense, by taking three lines from the encyclopedia, and constructing my own premise, I am ‘looking for truth,’ or ‘knowledge,’ insofar as that is possible.*

Setting the math aside for the moment, what I am really trying to say is, ‘truth may be sought by a careful analysis of language,’ for language is a tool for seeing things inside of our own heads.

The more words we have, the better we understand them, the more knowledge that opens up to us. When you consider that mathematics is really just a language of great precision, one that we can use to describe things in objective terms, then it becomes apparent there are some serious gaps in my own education.

*One of the ‘variables’ in writing is the level of education, or even merely the interest of the reader. It’s pretty likely someone much more knowledgeable than I will simply move on, while another person might be overwhelmed, and another might be intrigued by the possibilities. Some might see it as an absurdity, or find it boring. If you made it this far, thank you and have a good day. You really are a beautiful person. (This really is bullshit, Louis. -ed.) (Yes, I know. But it's good bullshit. -Louis)

You Know I'm Not Really a Cat, Right?

How does a frog tell the difference between a fly and the myriads of other flying, moving, drifting, floating objects in its world?

Perception is a process by which sensory stimulation is organized and translated, and stored into ‘usable experience.’

How does the mind or the brain translate stationary flashing lights on a screen into moving pictures, a kind of temporary ‘reality?’

How does an artist see colours? There are approximately one-point-four million hues visible to the naked human eye. How or why does the artist see them, and how is he or she able to mix pigments and put them into a painting? If you made a hundred artists all paint a picture of ‘an apple and nothing else,’ all the pictures would be different. You as an observer would see different things—different skills, different styles, different techniques, different lighting, different compositions.

You would find some are ‘better’ than others. You might be able to pick a favourite.

All of the raw, unorganized data that enters the brain is subconciously and instantaneously ‘corrected’ into ‘percepts.’

This is thinking at the level of the forebrain, a subconscious, animal level. It is instinctive more than learned. In tests, newborn babies backed away from visual cliff-images, yet they clearly had no experience of cliffs, or even of falling.

What this means, is that a car on a highway is immediately recognized as a full-sized car, no matter how near or how far away, no matter the ‘apparent size’ of the object. It is rare to mistake it for a model car, or a cartoon.

For centuries, gravity was taken for granted, it was 'the Law of God.' People assumed the world was flat, even when you can see its curvature from any big hill.

People felt the wind on their faces and never gave it a thought...because they couldn't see it. They simply could not see it, and therefore it did not exist. The notion that air was a substance was a breakthrough in thinking.

Previously it could not exist in their world.

A musical theme can be followed—otherwise it is just noise—no matter how many times the composer has changed the key, or the timing, or the volume, or what selection of instruments is playing what section or bar of music.

For a person to underperceptualize would be to experience the world as chaos. To overperceptualize is just as bad. This means ‘to organize sensory stimuli to the extent that stimuli not fitting into that organization are shut off.’ This would be to experience ‘reality,’ or the world in a depressive or hallucinatory state. It is to shut out reality, or to deny its meaning.

Perhaps one part of the brain is lying to another part, or more likely misinterpreting data from sensory stimuli. Perhaps this may cause autism or mental illnesses of various sorts.

Classical theory states that once an object has been perceived as an identifiable entity, it tends to be seen as a stable object having permanent characteristics. This so called ‘constancy’ is, according to Ludwig von Helmholtz; ‘The measure of a person’s ability to continually synthesize past experience and current sensory cues.’

In many ways perception is reality. To suffer from flawed perceptions would be to perceive a flawed reality.

There is no objectivity in art. Art is purely subjective. To produce art by polling results is to miss the point.

Once the numbers were in, artists would inevitably begin trying to anticipate the demand…which leads to stagnation in pursuit of an ever-narrowing ‘ideal.’

As an artist, to imitate another is the kiss of death.

This is vital, so read closely:

‘Only when one is experiencing an illusion, or when one is misreading visual cues, such as when cars and houses appear like toys from the altitude of an airplane, does one become aware of such sensations, and gain some insight into the role of the organization of percepts.’ –'The Encyclopedia'

Much testing has been done in experimental research using the testing of subjects with illusory material, in an attempt to separate individual percepts from the process as a whole.

Now, the reader obviously knows I'm not a cat. But how do you know?

How do we know what we know? What do we mean, when we say we know?

This is more than a Monty Python sketch revisited. It is our opinion that philosophical conjecture is the highest vocation.

Whereas all that has been written since the dawn of time, on the subject of metaphysics, has been a total waste.

It is our job to question the very nature of reality itself.

At Shalako Publishing we like to challenge all of our assumptions.

All of them, ladies and gentlemen.